HumTec Project House
The HumTec Project House at RWTH Aachen University aims at fostering high level interdisciplinary research between the humanities/social sciences and the engineering/natural sciences. HumTec is part of the RWTH Institutional Strategy, which is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments.
The Institutional Strategy of RWTH Aachen University comprises four distinct measures, including the strengthening of interdisciplinary collaboration.
HumTec contributes to this measure by providing a framework for top-level interdisciplinary research. In the project house, social scientists, humanities researchers as well as engineers, natural scientists and medical scientists work together in interdisciplinary teams on today’s major societal challenges.
Current Research Projects
The project house currently conducts three projects which are a continuation of projects from the first phase of Germany's Excellence Initiative:
- U-Turn – Continuation of the programs eHealth: Enhancing Mobility with Aging, Ethics for Energy Technology and City 2020+
- WebDisk – Continuation of the program HUMIC
- NeuroPeirce – Continuation of the program Natural Media & Engineering
Since July 1, 2013, the project house hosts three further Boost Fund projects with a duration of 3,5 years:
Seed Fund Projects
Furthermore, between 2013 and 2014, HumTec hosted conducted eight interdisciplinary Seed Fund Projects (de) with a duration of 12 months.
New Center of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Research: Five New Professorships
Under the conviction that the great challenges of our time cannot be addressed solely by applying natural sciences and technological approaches, but only in collaboration with specifically targeted humanities and social sciences research, the RWTH Faculty of Arts and Humanities has decided to establish a Center of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Research within the HumTec project house.
By establishing the new center, which is to consist of initially five professorships, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities makes a significant contribution to RWTH’s further development as an integrated, interdisciplinary university of technology. It expects that the new colleagues at the center will contribute to endowing the University with a distinct, internationally visible profile. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities will establish professorships in the following five areas:
- Applied Ethics with a Focus on the Ethics of Technology and Environmental Ethics
- Individual and Technology
- Computational Social Sciences and Humanities
- Technology and Society
- Philosophy of Science and Technology